Just something that does the basic things you'd want to do on a laptop, and will cope with remote working. It would be nice if it had enough capacity to run Protools but it's not the end of the world if not.

I haven't got a huge budget so a Mac is out of the question.

Also, is it a bit passé to buy Microsoft Office to go with it? There must be easier (and free) ways of carrying out basic word processing / spreadsheet tasks. I'm a bit behind with this all.